Product Overview

Launched in 2000, the Oracle Collaboration Suite was the first attempt by Oracle Corp to break the stranglehold of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes on the Enterprise messaging system market. Initially marketed as a Unified Messaging system, it has grown as a product to incorporate many of the features one would expect in an Enterprise level collaborative tool, as well as features more normally associated with standalone Content management systems. These features include: Microsoft Exchange can mean: Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Client: the native and bundled client of Exchange server up to version 5. ... Lotus Notes is a client-server collaborative software and e-mail system owned by Lotus Software, of the IBM Software Group. ... An enterprise messaging system (EMS) is a set of published Enterprise-wide standards that allows organizations to send semantically precise messages between computer systems. ... Unified Messaging (or UM) is the integration of different streams of messages (e-mail, Fax, voice, video, etc. ... Content management, or CM, is a set of processes and technologies that support the evolutionary life cycle of digital information. ...

• Real Time Collaboration
  • Instant Messaging
  • Web Conferencing
  • Desktop Sharing
• Unified Messaging
  • eMail
  • Voice Mail
  • Fax
  • Telephony
  • Wireless and Voice Access
  • Outlook integration
• Calendaring
• Content Management
  • Files
• Records Management

Richard Edwards, in an analysis of the product by the well respected Butler Bloor group wrote: "Oracle is clearly intent on providing Microsoft and IBM with stiff competition, and in moving to a unified workspace, Oracle Collaboration Suite seeks to bring together more of the ‘stuff’ that information workers use on a daily basis to do their jobs.

The promise of Oracle Collaboration Suite is to bring together the separate worlds of structured and unstructured information – BI and ECM. In Butler Group’s opinion, this is exactly where collaboration vendors should be heading. Within the next three to five years, Butler Group expects corporate e-mail solutions to become part of ECM suites, as the information contained within corporate e-mail systems is clearly of immense value to the organisation. This information should not be left languishing around inside users mailboxes; it should be managed and preserved in a system that permits others within the organisation to exploit it."

References

• Butler Report

--Bell2366 21:48, 12 March 2007 (UTC)